Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Been able to get a game in every Saturday since hitting PA, and a couple before The Move. The briefest of recaps:

Alpha Legion vs. Iron Warriors [1000] - Loss, and a nasty one at that. IW consolidated onto a short table edge after letting a couple squads get beaten on, opening up a disgusting 24" of firelane to cross to do anything to him.

Alpha Legion & Vostroyans vs. Iron Warriors & Tyranids [3000] - Win, and sweet hell it was nice to have some firepower on my side. In two turns we basically wiped the IW from the table, as the bulk of the 'nids deepstruck late in the game. Entertaining highlight for me was speed lord meltabombing one of the two IW land raiders for three turns, stripping off a lascannon pair, immobilizing and finally scragging it.

Alpha Legion & Death Guard vs. Dark Angels & Daemonhunters [3000] - Win, and pretty solid too. DG took some of the fire off my cultists, but once the Imperials realized that my 'nettes can only come in on cultists icons they focused a lot of attention vaporizing the lugs. Course, this was after one unit of girls - support by the Great Unclean One - butchered a unit of Grey Knight Terminators. But all in all a good game, with a lot of things coming together for Chaos.

Alpha Legion vs. Death Guard [1500] - Win! Was pretty concerned going into this game, but again things seemed to click for the Legion. By rolling was all over the place, but my luck held out. In the deciding combat of the game, his über-prince charged my dread, expecting an easy kill and then a free rampage through my firebase. Amazingly, his 3 S6+2D6 attacks all failed to penetrate, and my dread's S10 sent the rotten bastard back to the Warp. From here it was mostly mop-up - i.e. fisting/stomping some nurglings.

Alpha Legion vs. Death Guard II [1500] - Win, and a complete tabling after 12 turns. Same DG player, with a totally rebuilt list, this time with 2 14-strong infiltrating plague marine squads, 2 7-strong plague beareres, GUO, retooled über-prince & hulled defiler. He made it clear this was a grudge match and was completely happy when he killed the dread with his prince. I on the other hand was thrilled when I killed Big Papa with the havok launcher off my ultra-rhino, only after Papa diverted over to take care of my oblit, who had chainfisted an entire 'bearer unit to goo. At turn 6 the game was mine, but he insisted on playing til everything was dead on one side. He only had the hulled defiler vs. 13 melta-bombing cultists, 2 daemonettes, the powerfist champ, my havoks & the ultra-rhino (which hid). He stomped across the board toward the havoks, breaking and killing everything in combat while racking the havoks with fire. Finally, the last missile launcher havok killed the beast the turn before it would charge in.

This Saturday is a mega-battle, and I'll likely be taking my Khornate Daemon Legion in place of the Legion. Add to that the World Eaters & Death Guard (plus Titan!) on Chaos' side and whoever we hit are going to be a world of hurt ...

Tuesday, August 08, 2006

I feel that any Alpha Legion force should have at least one squad of cultists - otherwise it's just a bunch of chaos marines with cheap infiltration - and apart from being mandatory for daemons, that's about the only reason to take them. I recently built the smaller Scout cultists unit because I wanted more flexibility/insurance when it came to summoning in the 'nettes. That, and I had a box of beastmen sitting open.

Min/max? Not around here! The weakness of this list has become painfully apparently since I started running it, but I'm a) mostly stuck with it model-wise and b) not too concerned with winning games ... *sigh*

Long, painful story short(er): I stockpiled and started building an Alpha Legion army - the Iron Hydras led by Chaos Lord Severus Gaal - for the Eye of Terror 40k campaign, and happily squeeked out a win in the first game against some Iron Warrior scum. The next battle went less well, being massacred by the same Iron Warriors, but that wasn't totally unexpected. Then came game three, versus a friend (who had never played 40k before) playing Dark Angels (an army he had never played with before). Cutting to the gruesome end, ol' Severus was riddled with bullets and left for dead on the wastes of Scarus, as were most of his Iron Hydras. Queue the next army ...

2 years later and I had returned to the Legion, slimming down the list considerably - no more 15-marine squad madness! - but making sure to keep it nice, fluffy and generally ineffective. Naturally, a couple more loses followed, so the Legion drifted away again ...

Finally, got around to bashing together another list, building more cultists :D, and painting the blighters! After failing at a more traditional Alpha color scheme, I went with a super-muted, highlight-free, infiltratory (maybe?) scheme for my Anarchonquistadores.